LA.com doesn't want you to read these "Mad Men" stories, but we do

Our friends at LA.com continue to forget/neglect to run features stories generated by the Daily News entertainment staff, ensuring that our online presence is - uh, what's a diplomatic word - compromised. And so, we herewith thoughtfully provide today's "Mad Men" stories that got lost in LA.Com's cyberfog (to be fair, they did deign to post the review):

No TV series reflected the Zeitgeist this past year as thoroughly and ingeniously as AMC's drama "Mad Men" - no mean feat, as it takes place in the early 1960s. But its reflection and wry commentary on that era and how it got us where we are today clicked with viewers and made it the most-buzzed-about show since - well, "The Sopranos," the last show "Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner worked on.

For season two, "Mad Men" jumps from Thanksgiving 1960 to begin on Valentines Day 1962, a year Weiner calls "the most idealized of that period, which I'm trying to deconstruct. In our culture, there's 'American Graffiti,' 'Hairspray,' 'Animal House' - all of those are set in 1962. So I sort of wanted to live there, and it's not a particularly interesting time politically, but otherwise the whole thing is there."

For its efforts, the show has been rewarded with a Peabody Award, two Golden Globes and 16 Emmy nominations, the most of any drama series this year. It was also, with "Damages," the first show on basic cable to receive an Emmy nod in the best drama series category.

"Mad Men" examines the lives of those who toil at Sterling Cooper, a Manhattan advertising agency. Initially, what got discussed most about the show was the bad behavior of the characters - the incessant cigarette smoking, the casual and ubiquitous sexism, the inherent assumption that white men ruled the world. But, given the advertising milieu, what truly resonated throughout the first season was the notion of artifice, particularly in the way the characters presented themselves to the world while inside ossifying from uncertainty, bewilderment, and a yearning for meaning in their lives.

"There's nobody out there who has any sort of consciousness at all who doesn't at some time feel like, 'I don't feel like myself,'" says Weiner. "And that's a big part of the show, and that's a hard thing to dramatize."

No characters epitomize this like Don Draper (Golden Globe-winner and Emmy nominee Jon Hamm), Sterling Cooper's hot-shot idea man, and Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), a former secretary who begins season two as a promising young copywriter, the only woman in a wolfish boys club. Last season, viewers learned that Don came from hardscrabble origins and assumed another man's identity to get ahead and that Peggy became pregnant after a furtive tryst with a weasly co-worker, Pete (Vincent Kartheiser). Both strive to keep their messy personal stories secrets at Sterling Cooper.

"It takes a lot of physical and mental and psychic effort to do that," Hamm says of his character. "And as we'll see, that takes its toll. You can only hide so much so long - you can only keep so many plates spinning before they all come crashing down.

"But a big part of the dramatic momentum of this show is, how does this guy do it?" Hamm continues. "Will he figure it out, and will he start pulling plates and putting them down? Will he ever get to a place in his life where he can accept who he is and what he wants and what will make him happy?"

Weiner says that as the new season begins, "Something is different about Don, from the first frame of that (first) episode, and all he's expressing by the end is that he knows something is different. He wants to feel the catastrophe of his personality."

As for Peggy, Moss notes, "The main issue she's dealing with this season is, she's figuring out what she should do. Should she be one of the boys? Or should she be a woman, and what does it mean to be a woman in the workplace? She's a pioneer; there's no one to look up to, there's no plan to follow. So everything she does is the first time in that office. And she's majorly dealing with the issue of who she has to be. And that's looked at down the road, and it definitely gets more intense."

When the first season ended, Peggy had given birth, but then rejected her baby. "The main thing is it could not have come at a worse time for her, and she needs to continue what she's doing and if it takes compartmentalizing her emotions, that's what it takes," Moss says. "I don't think she thinks she's done anything wrong, and in the second season we're going to get into other people's feelings about what she's done."

"She's in a merit-based world in her mind," Weiner adds, "and everything that doesn't jibe with that, she ignores. So when ... Don tells her to go out and celebrate, she goes home; that's all she has - that's what I'm dealing with. This woman is a very intense, very complicated, very intelligent person. She has great ideas that they use even though they're coming from her - the guys say, 'It's like watching a dog playing a piano.' She has a great future if she doesn't get in her own way."

And in season two, Don and Peggy become allies.

"Don's history with women is complicated, but the women that Don's attracted to are women who are, in some ways, independent and have their own sort of thing going on," Hamm reveals. "And Peggy, for such a young person, has a lot of that sort of essence that is appealing to Don. He's not sexually attracted to her, but I think he sees in Peggy a lot of what he admires in a coworker and a colleague and in a person to be trusted. So it's fairly high praise from someone like Don who doesn't dole it out very liberally."

Moss agrees: "It's not at all a sexual attraction; it's a mutual respect. She looks up to him so much and wants his respect more than anyone else's, probably only his. She actually cares about what he thinks, because she knows how good he is. Peggy and Don have two things in common: One, they don't have any ulterior motives. They're not trying to get something out of the other one, or are trying to get ahead by using the other one. And they both have a big secret that they're hiding and they don't bring it into the office; they're there to work, and they see that in one another, and it builds a bond between them."

Whatever happens this season - and Weiner is a guy who admits to being a "control freak" and hates it when plot spoilers get revealed (he begged us not to mention something in the first episode that didn't seem all that big a deal) - Hamm has such trust in his boss that he'll follow him anywhere.

"He had mentioned a lot of [plot points], but I tend to take a lot things he mentions with a grain of salt, and realize that he'll say one thing, and the way it will appear will be completely opposite from the way I imagined it," Hamm says. "I basically told him, 'Write it and I will try to do it.' It's worked out pretty great for us so far.

"He plays everything pretty close to the vest anyway, and I work better that way, I don't like to know what's coming down the road. I'm not a guy who sneaks into the writers' room and looks at the (plotline) cards. He's so good at what he does - every episode is this little fun story, and it's like a serialized novel. You can't wait to get to the next chapter."

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And here's a sidebar story on how the advertising is created for the show:

An underappreciated aspect of "Mad Men's" genius is its verisimilitude in depicting the process of creating advertising campaigns, both inspired and somewhat hackneyed. Series creator Matthew Weiner couldn't hide his delight at having met Stan Freberg - a humorist and legendary adman of the '50s and '60s - and reporting, "Stan Freberg thinks the show is accurate and fun - that's a big pat on the back."

For the show, Weiner meets with advertising consultants when constructing his fictitious ad campaigns.

"It turns out that I'm pretty good at it, they've told me," he says. "That's because I'm working backwards - I do the ads to tell the story, so to me, it's about finding something that's thematically related to it and yet not hitting you over the head."

Two of the memorable campaigns from season one were Don Draper's (Jon Hamm) elegiac pitch for the Kodak Carousel slide projector and Peggy Olsen's (Elisabeth Moss) ingeniously veiled sell of the "Relax-icizer," a fly-by-night vibrating exercise device which, she discovered, had a more visceral use, as a sexual stimulator.

"In any other show, every campaign would be like the Carousel - this tremendous, he-knocked-it-out-of-the-park kind of thing," Hamm notes. "But a lot of them are for [b.s.] little things, too - the [friggin'] exercise belt, Secor laxatives, Right Guard. That's a lot of this game, too - [b.s.] products that you don't want to have to sell, but they still need a campaign. I'm fascinated by that.

"I'm particularly drawn to the Liberty Mutual executive private accounts - it's just Don saying, 'I don't want my wife looking where I spend my money,'" Hamm adds. "It's that kind of stuff that's fun to watch. Or Lucky Strike, where they find a new way to spin cancer."

"I'm proud of things on the show that have a verisimilitude to the creative process," Weiner says. "So the Relax-icizer, the weight-loss belt, it's all made up, it starts out being called the P.E.R. - the Personal Exercise Regime. Then it's called the Electricizer, then the Rejuvenator, then it's called the Relax-icizer. It tells us about the business they're in, but it's a chance for me to show that process."

Don's Carousel pitch - he's instructed to trumpet the gadget's high-tech component, but opts instead to celebrate its nostalgic function of helping consumers recall happier times - ended "Mad Men's" first season on a resonant note, and remains Weiner's favorite faux campaign.

"That was about the philosophy of how to sell the product and also about what was going on with Don," Weiner says. "So there's a taller order for me.

"I kept writing responses for the end of that scene, and just kept thinking, no," he recalls. "If you write a movie about stand-up comedy or ballet or art, you have to have a reaction shot from an audience to convince viewers that it really was good. But I just love that Don [dismissively] said [to the Kodak executives], 'Good luck at your next meeting.' He knew that that was a great pitch."

- "Mad Men:" 10 tonight; AMC.